According to the SemiAccurate website, Apple is planning to move to ARM chips as soon as possible. Sources have told the website that this is a "done deal." The reported deal could also see ARM chips make their way into Apple's desktop range as well.

Maybe - you can't easily predict Apple's future actions. However, consider the success of the Mac in recent years - which has been partially fueled by the higher level of compatibility with stock PC's. It makes it far, far easier to run Windows apps on Macs using Fusion or Parallels - and for home use, it makes a lot of Windows games accessible to Mac users. Would Apple pitch all of that? I have my doubts.

Today's Smalltalk 4 You takes an overview look at the browser set in VA Smalltalk (omitting the ENVY specific ones - we'll go through those in a separate tutorial). If you prefer a written walkthrough to video, then skip down to it. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Today we'll look at the inspector in VA Smalltalk. First, open a workspace, and enter something you can inspect - in the example below, it's a simple string concatenation expression. Note that you don't need to highlight the expression to inspect it - simply drop the cursor at the end of the expression:

The inspector shows you the object, and any component parts. For a string, that's the individual slots with characters; for a non collection, it would instead show instance variables:

Once you have the inspector, you can drill down on any element by double clicking on it. You can also open a little execution workspace attached to the inspector - go to the Options menu and select Workspace:

Finally, if you want to capture a screenshot (of the window or entire screen), you don't need to leave VA for that. Simply open the Options menu again, and follow the Snapshot pull right. There are various options for what you can snapshot, and how to save what you decide to grab:

Thomas Koschate looks around the world of Smalltalk - he has some useful advice for both Cincom and Instantiations, and notes that on a personal level, he's looking at Pharo. That accords with my progression as well, in a lot of ways :)

Honest Hearts is an upcoming add-on for Fallout: New Vegas, developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks. Unlike Dead Money, it will be released simultaneously on all platforms[1] on May 17, 2011.

I wonder if the botched patch delayed it more than Sony's PSN shutdown due to the data breach...

Today's Smalltalk 4 You shows you how to easily update all of the packages contained within a bundle (including sub-bundles within it). The code I used in the screencast is in the public store - it can also be downloaded as a zip file. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

Andreas Raab has been exploring the OpenQwaq codebase, and has found some cool stuff. For instance:

This is the first part of our series about the Cool bits of OpenQwaq. OpenQwaq has a complete integration with Python. What this means is that from OpenQwaq you can call Python code simply via something like here:

I've been involved with the Toronto Smalltalk User Group for 20 years now, the past dozen or so as the primary organizer. Lately we've had a few people show up that were new to Smalltalk and wanted to learn more. We talk to them about the simple syntax, show them Pharo and Seaside, tell them about the other dialects, and try whatever we can to get them enthused.

He goes on to talk about the things he likes about Smalltalk; go read the whole thing.

The OpenQwaq project is based on the commercial software that Teleplace has been delivering to the market over the past four years. It is a highly-secure, enterprise-class virtual collaboration platform that has been used by large commercial enterprises and federal agencies. The OpenQwaq project enables organizations - large and small, profit and not-for-profit - to implement virtual workspaces for their specific needs.

Licensed under GPL2, so you may need to look into whether you can make use of it in your context.

Today's Javascript 4 You. Today we look at using JQuery selectors to select an element, and use prepend and append to modify it. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube.

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

One of the most commonly used tools in any Smalltalk implementation is the workspace - it's where you do ad-hoc testing and exploratory coding. VA Smalltalk is no different - th eonly thing you have to know is that the Workspace is opened via File>>New in the Launcher, not via a menu item labeled "Workspace:

Once that's open, you can do exactly what you would expect - start typing Smalltalk code and executing it. There's full support for workspace variables, so you don't need to create temporary declarations and line your executions up. Here's the new workspace:

Now you can try typing in some Smalltalk code and executing it:

As you would expect, that gets you an inspector. You don't need to highlight the variable in question; you can just put the cursor down after it. You can also highlight any expression, of course.

The toolbar contains a lot of additional functionality, including access to senders/implementors; simply highlight a message send, and use those. As shown in the screencast, each toolbar item has tooltip help - just walk across the workspace and explore for yourself.

When I gave my talk at Smalltalk Solutions 2011, I was asked a question about the Facebook interface I created while I was at Cincom - what license was that code under. Since I wrote it while I was employed at Cincom, I couldn't answer the question, so I deferred it to Cincom (some of their staff were in the presentation, and said that they would "get back to me").

Well, it's May now, and Smalltalk Solutions was nearly two months ago. I'm still waiting for an answer :)

I missed the whole bleeding edge of the announcement thing last night - I was busy playing a video game. However, as I look around this morning, in the aftermath of the tracking down and killing of Bin Laden, there's been an interesting technical wrinkle: Twitter seem to have been where the news broke.

If cable news is where the news used to get announced, social media, with Twitter in the lead, is where it gets broken now.

Welcome to episode 27 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. This week's podcast was recorded at Smalltalk Solutions 2011 - it's Michael Lucas-Smith and Martin Kobetic talking about Xtreams:.

Xtreams is a generalized stream/iterator framework providing simple, unified API for reading from different kinds of sources and writing into different kinds of destinations (Collections, Sockets, Files, Pipes, etc). Streams themselves can be sources or destinations as well. This allows to stack streams on top of each other. At the bottom of such stack is some kind of non-stream (e.g. a collection), we will call it a terminal. Directly above that is a specialized stream providing a streaming facade over the terminal. The rest of the streams in the stack we'll call transforms. Their primary purpose is to perform some kind of transformation on the elements that are passing through. Application code interacts with the top stream of the stack the same way it would with any other stream (or stream stack) producing/consuming the same elements. The goal of the framework is to provide consistent behavior between different stacks so that the application can treat them the same way regardless of what exactly is the ultimate source or destination. For example if the application code analyzes binary data, it should be able to treat the source stream the same way if it is a simple stream over a ByteArray or if it is a stack that provides contents of a specific binary part of a mulitpart, gziped, chunked HTTP response from a socket. Xtreams is an attempt to achieve this goal in a scalable and efficient manner.

If you would prefer to watch the video, scroll down to the embed. The talk was over 90 minutes long, so I've split the audio podcast in half - part two will be out next week..

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

Welcome to episode 27 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. This week's podcast was recorded at Smalltalk Solutions 2011 - it's Michael Lucas-Smith and Martin Kobetic talking about Xtreams:.

Xtreams is a generalized stream/iterator framework providing simple, unified API for reading from different kinds of sources and writing into different kinds of destinations (Collections, Sockets, Files, Pipes, etc). Streams themselves can be sources or destinations as well. This allows to stack streams on top of each other. At the bottom of such stack is some kind of non-stream (e.g. a collection), we will call it a terminal. Directly above that is a specialized stream providing a streaming facade over the terminal. The rest of the streams in the stack we'll call transforms. Their primary purpose is to perform some kind of transformation on the elements that are passing through. Application code interacts with the top stream of the stack the same way it would with any other stream (or stream stack) producing/consuming the same elements. The goal of the framework is to provide consistent behavior between different stacks so that the application can treat them the same way regardless of what exactly is the ultimate source or destination. For example if the application code analyzes binary data, it should be able to treat the source stream the same way if it is a simple stream over a ByteArray or if it is a stack that provides contents of a specific binary part of a mulitpart, gziped, chunked HTTP response from a socket. Xtreams is an attempt to achieve this goal in a scalable and efficient manner.

If you would prefer to watch the video, scroll down to the embed. The talk was over 90 minutes long, so I've split the audio podcast in half - part two will be out next week..

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

Fringe is one of the few shows that keeps holding my interest. Last night's penultimate (for the season) episode ended with a really curious thing:

Peter stepped into the machine that has dominated this season

Next thing we see, he's older, and there seems to be street fighting going on in NYC

So we aren't really sure where he ended up - the show's "home" reality in the future, the "Walternate" reality in the future, or perhaps a universe we haven't seen yet. All we know for sure is that Peter is older, and that the people where he landed know him as a long time member of "Fringe Division". That hints at it being the Walternate reality, but it could be the home reality, and they could have created a "Fringe Division" between now and when he landed.